Government Integrity Project

NLPC “blows the whistle” on government officials and interest groups engaged in questionable activities. NLPC has filed formal Complaints with a variety of authorities and regulators, including the Federal Election Commission, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Congressional Ethics Committees.

NLPC supports government integrity in two additional ways: by promoting the First Amendment as the basis for campaign finance reform, and by promoting use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As a multicultural radical, Thomas Perez is well-suited for his current job as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As a government official, he is anything but that. Last week a lawyer for the Department of Labor went public with damning evidence that Perez, while heading DOL during the second Obama term, thwarted congressionally-mandated payouts to Cold War-era nuclear arsenal employees with job-related illnesses. The whistleblower, Stephen Silbiger, accused Perez of “open hostility” toward the workers, some of whom died waiting in futility for their claims to be processed. The story, which appeared in last Friday’s Washington Free Beacon, suggests the Democratic Party, like Perez, is not on the side of American workers, populist rhetoric notwithstanding.

National Legal and Policy Center on several occasions has been sharply critical of Thomas Perez, particularly in March 2013 when President Barack Obama named him to succeed Hilda Solis as the nation’s next … Read More ➡

The central figure in the burgeoning House Information Technology scandal was arrested yesterday while attempting to board a jet to his native Pakistan. Imran Awan, his wife, and two brothers were longtime employees of a score of House Democrats, collecting more than $4 million in salaries, but were seldom seen on Capitol Hill.

On July 17, NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm predicted that the IT scandal was “about to explode.”

When news first broke in February that the IT workers were under investigation by the Capitol Police for theft of House property and possibly breaching security, the Awans were fired by a score of House members who employed them as “shared employees.” The only exception was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) who kept Imran Awan employed even though he was banned from the House server network. She got around the ban by designating Awan as an … Read More ➡

A family of Democratic Congressional IT staffers is under investigation for stealing equipment from Congressional offices, possible money laundering, and potentially compromising the House of Representatives’ IT network.

The Capitol Police are investigating Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, and two brothers Abid and Jamal Awan following a data breach this past February, and have barred them from accessing the House network as of March. IT staffers are shared across offices, meaning that the Awans were not employed by any single office.

Between 2009 and 2017, the Awans were paid roughly $4 million. Yet, according to Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter for the Daily Caller , there is no sign of this money. Imran Awan and Hina Alvi lived in an unremarkable apartment and did not have any significant outward trappings of wealth.

In addition to the income they received from the House of Representatives, … Read More ➡

Over 1.3 million additional pro-net neutrality comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appear to be coming from non-U.S. filers from foreign countries, according to a new analysis released today by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a leading government watchdog.

A forensic analysis of comments received between July 3rd and Net Neutrality “Day of Action” on July 12th shows that the FCC was flooded with 1.3 million comments from addresses in France, Russia and Germany. This time the comments came almost exclusively from the email domains Pornhub.com and Hurra.de (Germany). As with NLPC’s previous analysis, thousands of the comments appear to come from fake email addresses and fake physical addresses overseas.

NLPC’s latest analysis of foreign comments flooding the FCC docket matches similar patterns found in our previous analysis and some new patterns as well:

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) today filed an article of impeachment against President Trump, and was joined by Rep. Al Green (D-TX). Notwithstanding all the impeachment talk in some quarters, this is the first time an impeachment article has been introduced in the House.

“If they had a good case based on real information, I think they would mention it by now and put their cards on the table,” Boehm, a former Pennsylvania state prosecutor and former counsel for the board of directors at the Legal Services Corporation, told The Daily Signal. “They don’t have high crimes and misdemeanors. They don’t have low crimes and misdemeanors.”

Sherman is the Congressman who claimed that Russia manipulated the Electoral College to elect Trump. On CNN’s Newsroom on January 9, he said, “The fact is that … Read More ➡

Today in the New York Times, Yamiche Alcindor reports on the “odd new celebrity” of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) after years of being considered as one of the most corrupt House members by both liberal and conservative ethics groups. From the article:

Ken Boehm, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-leaning, ethics-in-government group, called her a grandstander.

“It’s odd that you would come out for impeachment like right at the gate,” he said. “The guy takes his hand off the Bible and it’s like, ‘Impeach him.’”

Today, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) asked the Justice Department to investigate the use of stolen identities in the submission of public comments on net neutrality to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

But he asked for a probe of only these anti-net neutrality comments, even though we recently released two analyses demonstrating that hundreds of thousands of fake emails were sent in support of net neutrality.

Despite his professed support for net-neutrality, Rep. Pallone provides non-neutral information based on a murky allegation from an activist group that provides no substantive analysis or investigative proof regarding the alleged 450,000 “fake” comments in question.

In contrast, our analyses were based on fact. We offered specific examples of the fraud we identified, and when possible, we quantified it. We found that there are hundreds of thousands of comments in the docket from people who say they never filed, from fake email addresses, and from … Read More ➡

Illinois Representative Luis Gutierrez recently referred to President Trump as a “con artist” on CNN’s “State of the Union”program. Gutierrez’s comments were in reference to allegations that the President Trump asked former FBI director James Comey to halt a federal investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

“[The President] knew exactly what he was doing,” Gutierrez said. “I know a con artist when I see one, and I saw a con artist that day.”

The twelve-term Democratic congressman has a history of trying to garner media attention. In March, Gutierrez participated in a sit-in at an ICE office to protest the Trump administration’s deportation policies, and was briefly placed in plastic restraints before the officers decided not to arrest him. “They threatened us with arrest. We said ‘We’re ready to go to jail,'” said Gutierrez. “We stood up to the bullies here…Unfortunately, tonight and tomorrow they will continue to prey … Read More ➡

More than 235,000 additional pro-net neutrality comments submitted in recent days to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) docket appear to be coming from non-U.S. filers from foreign countries, according to a new analysis released today by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a leading government watchdog.

A forensic analysis of comments received between May 24th and May 30th shows that the FCC was flooded with 236,999 comments from domains in France, Russia and Germany. The comments came almost exclusively from three email domains: Yahoo.fr (France), Mail.ru (Russia) and Yahoo.de (Germany). An analysis of hundreds of the comments shows that most appear to come from fake email addresses and fake physical addresses overseas.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has confirmed its belief that about 100,000 public comments that used the same language as EFF’s own pro-net neutrality campaign are counterfeit. The messages were filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as part of the public comment process.

In an analysis released on May 31, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) found that 465,322 pro-net neutrality comments, or nearly one-fifth of the total, appear to be bogus. Of the 465,322, we found:

Over 100,000 examples of identical comments used language from an Electronic Frontier Foundation letter desk campaign in which the email addresses were generated from a fake email generator program using as many as 10 different email domains. A check of hundreds of the 100,140 comments also revealed that the submissions included fake physical addresses and possibly even fake names.